Wild Ones (Arakure), Volume 1

This is a delightful manga series about a girl, Sachie Wakamura, orphaned at the age of 15 who finds out she’s a yukuza princess when her grandfather comes to retrieve her at her mother’s funeral. She is assigned a personal body guard, Rakuto Igarashi, who also happens to be the student council president of the high school she starts to attend. Rakuto is a “princely” type guy who never really lets anybody get to know him — so, of course, he’s very popular with the girls at school. Rakuto is a orphan, too, who Sachie’s grandfather has taken in and treated like family. Upon meeting, Rakuto treats Sachie very nicely which makes Sachie thinks he’s weird, because, of course, normal people don’t treat strangers as friendly as he does. But as you can guess, they met in the past and Rakuto has promised to protect his princess. Sigh … it makes your heart pitter-patter. There’s sweetness all around mixed with some light humor (mostly about the Sachie’s new yukuza “family”), and a fair bit of action oriented violence. I enjoyed this first volume greatly enough to order the next 3 volumes from Japan. Fortunately, this is also being serialized in the “Hana to Yume” magazine, so I will be able to keep up with this series as it releases :).